• On a more personal level, interestingly, many people seem to be questioning the way our society is organized and see the pandemic as a "wake-up call".  Here is my personal view on the structural lessons from this epidemic:

Why did we get into this mess and how can we be sure this will not happen again?

This pandemic did not take experts, the United Nations or the World Health Organisation by surprise. There are many years that pandemics are mentioned as posing one of the biggest  threats to our societies, together with climate change. Of course they are inter-related.

Our societies are particularly vulnerable to pandemic risks for several reasons. It is the combination of these reasons that created a lethal cocktail. So what did we do to get here?

1.       Creating the conditions for a deadly virus to appear: The virus came from an animal. It is still unclear how it occurred. But it is well known that the way we handle and treat animals (wild or not) offer ideal conditions for virus mutation and antibiotic resistance. 

2.       Creating the conditions for the virus to spread widely: 

The mass movement of people and goods made it possible for the virus to take a place and spread across the world. It is however not clear how much interconnection is needed to create a pandemic. Pandemics happened before in history, in times where planes did not exist.

3.       Behavioural response of the population: Our populations and governments have been slow in acknowledging the threat, referring to the “simple flu” for many weeks and not taking preventive actions. Even when the threat became more obvious, it has been hard to get those least at risk to comply with measures. Sometimes we are frustrated that history repeats itself and attribute it to memory loss. But here we have seen country after country repeating the same cycle: denial, minimization of the risks, panic, lack of preparation becoming obvious… 

4.       Failure of crisis response systems: Public authorities did not have an off-the-shelves plan to deal with the crisis. South-East Asian countries were better prepared because they had themselves faced SARS. Test kits and masks were almost immediately in shortage. Public authorities had to make decisions in the absence of reliable data on the spread of the disease and the fatality rate. 

5.       Shortcomings and failure of our health systems: Health systems essentially focus on curative care and neglect of public health: Prevention receives very little attention in medical training; doctors are not trained in nutrition for example. The curative sector has its limits, and these limits are currently tested around the world. 

So what is an action plan to ensure we do not get into this again?

1)      Support policies aimed at changing fundamentally farm raising practices across the world. 

2)      We need to develop proper protocols to deal with crises, and actually a broad range of possible crises. We need protective equipment to be available quickly and dispatched widely. We need to have coordinated teams of experts across sciences and social sciences to develop tests quickly, to collect and analyse data and coordinate their expertise. We need to be able to put in place production capacity that can meet new needs (such as the needs for face masks). 

3)      We need to ensure that the labour market can adjust quickly – that workers in sectors that face falls in demand can be quickly deployed in sectors that face increases in demand. 

4)      We need to educate people and doctors to be aware of the benefits of preventive practices, we need to promote healthy nutrition, exercise and promote mental health from early on in life.